I read the review twice to make sure, but there is no musical description here, just the constant refrain that it's "geared for radio play" and "meant to be played solely on the radio" and that it's "mainstream radio music". The closest that it gets to describing the music is when it says that a few songs "do resemble a lot of what Iced Earth has done in the past for me, a lot of what was right about their music, and a lot of what they should be doing." But that sentence would be meaningless to anyone who doesn't already know what Iced Earth sounds like.

If the writer of the review is reading this: it's a pretty common criticism of IE that they have a few killers per album amidst a sea of fillers, but you need to be able to describe it with actual musical detail. If you want to express that Stu Block "performs well in all areas", then don't just say that; elaborate on specific parts of the album where he uses his range to great effect. And if you're going to accuse an album with a six-minute instrumental and a nine-minute epic as just being in it for the radio play, you really need to back that up with more than this.

I noticed this at a very much later time than I probably should have, but I think it'd probably be good to respond.

Incorruptible's a really strange album for me, but I feel like the album itself had, in a way, highlighted the growing mediocrity from the band. Of course, saying that they're gearing music for radio play is wrong, but it felt just like that when I listened to it. It clouded a lot of my thoughts on the album itself, and... if I'm being honest, I do find that this review was wrong in a number of areas, that particular factor included.

Recently, I've come to realize that there's a particular way to write reviews, and that the focus itself should be on more points than just "oh, wow, this sounds like shit". I'm doing my best to be more descriptive with these reviews, and at this point, I'm still learning how to do it all with a good coat of paint. It's part of the reason I've begun to go back and rewrite my older reviews, and part of the reason I will likely do so for some of my less-than-worthwhile reviews. I try to strive for some form of acceptable standard with my reviews, and I'd feel bad if I let too many bad biases slip through like this particular review did.

Given time, I'm probably gonna re-review it. I feel the album deserves at least that from me. I've been busy as of late, so I don't know if it'd be any time soon, but... it'll certainly be in the waterworks. So, with that in mind... thanks for bringing this to my attention. I appreciate it quite a bit.

Is he trying to say that the band has run out of inspiration, and is also conscious of the fact, attempting to make up for it by appealing to a lower common denominator?

Yeah, I don't know if that's the kind of thought process that metal musicians might have when they streamline their style. Not even people like Jon Schaffer, I reckon.

You're entirely right. I completely agree with you on that. I was wrong to go and say that. It was a shallow review in general, and I wrote that in a very much pessimistic and biased state of mind.

While I won't go and say that the album itself doesn't FEEL streamlined, however, I definitely went about doing it the wrong way, and is probably the number one reason why I ought to rewrite the review when I get a chance to do so. As a relatively new person to reviewing, I'm still finding myself having troubles getting down to the exact points and putting down just why I feel that these albums don't perform well... and I can see I'm not the first to see just how bad that ends up getting with some of the older reviews.

Back in 2017, I started a thread bringing up something similar to this, I probably came at it from the wrong angle, and the thread was shut down and locked. However, in the end, this massive thread is pretty much exactly what I was trying to get at, I'm surprised no one mentioned it at the time, but all good. As this thread is so huge, it began back in 2004 if I'm not mistaken, is the ultimate goal here for people, users, mods and admins to come across reviews they feel are "not up to standard" we'll say?

I cannot see from my quick look, but I guess someone's view of a review that is not up to par differs person to person, so is there a guideline you guys are going by when selecting not so informative reviews? I know when writing a review, there needs to be standards to adhere to. But if there is some guideline, is it listed anywhere and ultimately what happens when someone brings up a link to the questionable reviews in this thread? Does it get discussed and then someone decides whether it gets deleted or not?

I know this would be a massive job which would take a long time, as there are thousands of reviews on here....

This thread serves the purpose of letting us know if you find reviews which don't follow our rules and were mistakenly accepted. We don't want people to go on crusades though; we'd prefer if users just posted reviews they might find in passing that seem to have been accepted in error. We'd much rather they not go hunting for such reviews. Once posted here, we'll look at them and decide if they were accepted in error or not.

It's important to keep in mind that our rules for reviews are very basic; our standards for what we're looking for are pretty simple. I won't go into detail, because I have in other places before, but for reviews we look for three things: (1) that the review, above all, describes the music of the album; (2) that the review is well written and formatted correctly in English; and, (3) that the review is a genuine opinion. The latter can be hard to judge, but we usually weight on the side of it being a genuine opinion (even if a controversial or negative opinion). Your previous thread - on negative biases - seemed to be more focused on wanting to police genuine opinions and we don't police such things here. Even if the review attacks the band, or might not have anything novel to say, so long as it meets the three requirements we just listed then we will accept/keep it.

This thread serves the purpose of letting us know if you find reviews which don't follow our rules and were mistakenly accepted. We don't want people to go on crusades though; we'd prefer if users just posted reviews they might find in passing that seem to have been accepted in error. We'd much rather they not go hunting for such reviews. Once posted here, we'll look at them and decide if they were accepted in error or not.

It's important to keep in mind that our rules for reviews are very basic; our standards for what we're looking for are pretty simple. I won't go into detail, because I have in other places before, but for reviews we look for three things: (1) that the review, above all, describes the music of the album; (2) that the review is well written and formatted correctly in English; and, (3) that the review is a genuine opinion. The latter can be hard to judge, but we usually weight on the side of it being a genuine opinion (even if a controversial or negative opinion). Your previous thread - on negative biases - seemed to be more focused on wanting to police genuine opinions and we don't police such things here. Even if the review attacks the band, or might not have anything novel to say, so long as it meets the three requirements we just listed then we will accept/keep it.

Thanks for responding and listing the review rules.

I gotta say, after going through the first 5-10 pages of this thread, going back to 2004, I don't see any of those reviews anymore. I mean, all of them listed were shockingly bad and I can see why you want them gone. As for my previous thread about the negative bias, I guess I was coming from the angle that if the reviewer was just basically attacking the band and talking nothing really about the music and just saying "the singer sucks, the drummer sucks, that song sucks, the album sucks, the band sucks", aside from being a genuine opinion, it hardly qualifies as a decent review. So now I have the 3 golden rules and if I see any reviews that dont contain all 3 in my travels...then i'll post them

Barely a paragraph long, with only a few of the sentences describing the music. The other review for this album isn't great either, but has just enough description, I think it squeaks by.

First one is poof. Second one is ehhhhhhhh. It's mega short and we frown on One Paragraph Wonders but honestly that might pass as a very succinct 3 pointer. I'll let another mod double check that.

HuggieBigs wrote:

https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Mayhem/Wolf%27s_Lair_Abyss/251

Anti semitic sentiments. Take it down please.

I'm not sure what you're asking for here? You just linked the album itself, not any particular review. I read the newest one and found nothing offending. If you're asking for the whole album to be taken down then yeah that's not happening. That's not how it works here.

Having embraced his Hebrew bloodline, Cashhammer embarked on a mission to revive this dead entity and to breathe life into it once more.

Noctir's review, that's what HuggieBigs is asking for.

I'm not sure about Noctir's personal views, but it seems like he was going for a laugh more than being outright anti-semetic. That looks like a light duty Cartman line rather than an indictment of a civilization, let alone a cornerstone to base anything more than a dig off of. Plus, he doesn't pursue it any further than that one line. He's talking about how the album is a cash grab and contextualizing it in a joke.

I'm working on a review where I call the phrase "androgynous Frenchman" an oxymoron. Is that too mean or are we allowed to toss in an off color joke once in a while?

He's passable. We don't really have the strictest standards; so long as you focus on describing the music of the album, you write well, and your opinion is genuine we will accept your review. He appears to check all those boxes.

"Few are the albums that do not have something about them that, changed or rectified, would have made them that tiny bit better. Not so with Heir To Despair. I seriously cannot think of any element in Heir that makes me reconsider giving it top marks."

But then he doesn't tell us what those elements are. At all. What I learned from this review is: Scenario IV: Dread Dreams is good, Graveyard is bad, Heir to Despair is good because it's similar to Scenario IV. But in what ways? I have no idea. What if I never listened to either Graveward or Scenario IV?

The rest is the reviewer talking about how he rates albums, I guess. And that's it's a good album because it satisfies these criticisms. Again, I don't know how. Am I being nitpicky?

What happens when you get two great bands, in their humble and honest first steps, in their first best appearence? You get the results of this amazing split release off course.

This split saw both bands take on a different route in their sound, with Rotting Christ ending their earlier Death/Grind sound for a deadly, killer, heavy as hell doom sound. Monumental, manifest on the sadness in your soul, throwing a huge rock over your tomb; it honestly feels like dying.

Rotting Christ's offering to the pyre of this release is an amazingly constructed song that will remind you of much, but all of them were suprisingly released after it. Amazingly slow, guitar driven doom/death metal from both bands. Think of a harsher, nearly non-melodic version of Evoken, and you are getting close.

But don't get really close. The stein of rot and decay will take away your soul. Such is the suffering and doom in this monumental release.

very poorly written, barely descriptive, too short for its own good and, although it's subjective, quite misleading.

After TNOTB was kindly given a promo version of the album from Season of Mist, I was going to be patient like any regular fan, but I simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to hear this long-awaited album so early before it’s release and give it the glowing recommendation it would undoubtedly deserve as the logical extension of the sound on Elements. Well, are you expecting love for Jupiter because it’s in this column, the one I pretty much devote to death metal that I happen to love? Too bad. Sadly, I regret ever wanting to listen to this jumbled mess of an album. Frankly, I can barely listen to this atrocity. Being one of my first death metal bands, I love all of Atheist’s old material, but this album just doesn’t cut it in any way. Consider this my disappointment of 2010.

Firstly, the biggest criticism I have with this album is with it’s production. It’s clipped worse than Death Magnetic! Sonically, I think that this is the worst, most sterile-sounding album I’ve ever heard. Of course, I half-expected this when it was revealed that Jason Suecof (i.e., the dude who mixes/produces seemingly all of the sterile crappy mainstream metal these days) was mixing the album, but this is worse than I could have possibly imagined. This fucker is clipped to hell, and the entire mix is void of any dynamic range whatsoever, leaving each instrument as some lifeless layer of loud noise. Hell, clipping aside, the mix is still terrible, with the drums obnoxiously loud, the vocals kind of muddy-sounding, the guitars a little bit low for my liking, and the bass just existing, lacking the genuine feel it had on Unquestionable Presence.

As for the music itself, it’s really fucking boring. Atheist used to be innovators. Now it seems like they listened to a Necrophagist or The Faceless album and though, “Hey, now people want tech death to sound like this.” Sure, the technicality is still present, but it just seems to have no purpose. On all of Atheist’s older albums, the songs had a sense of direction–the technicality was there for a reason, and the complex song structures were natural progressions of the music. Here, it just feels like technicality for the sake of being technical, with parts just cut and pasted together. I think I need to go through this album track by track to really get all of my gripes out.

In addition, there are some attempts at being catchy (which Atheist used to be surprisingly good at, considering that they’re a death metal band), such as on ‘Second to Sun,’ but those fail miserably. That riff at 2:01 sounds like some shit I’d hear in a Lamb of God song! That section at 2:40? It sounds like some bad attempt at a breakdown. No, not like the awesome one in ‘An Incarnation’s Dream,’ but more like one you’d find in a Suicide Silence song. Yuck!

Surely things must get better, right? Well, no. ‘Fictitious Glide’ is next, and this is just getting more boring by the minute. The riffs at the beginning of this song are so bland it isn’t even funny. Then the “technicality” shows up for some reason, and it sounds completely out of place. It just gets worse when Kelly’s vocals join in the mess, making for a clusterfuck of tech-drivel. The solos are stale and forced, just like any modern tech-death that’s been released over the past few years. Hell, what the fuck is with that riff at 3:11? I could almost see some crappy groove metal band playing that. At the very least, the solo section starting at 3:45 is decent. It sounds a bit forced (especially due to the fact that it’s rather fast, considering that speed has never been a priority for Atheist), but at least it’s an interesting enough arrangement.

‘Fraudulent Cloth’ just starts with an obnoxiously boring riff, and Kelly’s vocals has never sounded so past their prime. I saw Atheist live last year, and they played an amazing show, so I really don’t know what happened to Kelly’s vocals between then and now. Well, this song is just more of the same. Sterile production, sterile riffs, and “tech-y” songwriting (and I mean that in the most negative way possible). When I hear the obligatory tech bits in these songs, I can’t help but be reminded of later-era (read as: boring) Dream Theater. It just feels like it’s now a contest of “Look what I can do,” and it fails miserably at sounding like a coherent musical structure.

‘Live, and Live Again’ continues with the boring, simple riffs that eventually transition into boring technical sections. The chorus on this song is just laughable, and the production here sounds especially botched for some reason. Oh well. The break at 1:50 had some potential, but Kelly’s Mudvayne-like vocals just make this section impossible to take seriously.

‘Faux King Christ’ starts with a rather boring intro. Kelly’s vocals sound pretty funny here too, with the chorus of “Faux King Christ” sounding like “FUCK-ING CHRIST.” Oh, how clever! If you want some lifeless guitar wankery, then jump straight to 1:53 and hear the solo. Really, it’s getting pointless for me to keep describing these songs, since they’re practically indistinguishable from each other and completely unmemorable aside from a few silly vocal lines.

‘Tortoise The Titan’ might just be the dumbest title I’ve ever heard for a metal song. Sadly, the title is pretty much the only interesting thing going on here. These tremolo-picked riffs that are appearing all over Jupiter are just so utterly stale, and this song has a particularly boring one. Otherwise, just skip on to the next track.

The intro from ‘When the Beast’ is a perfect example of another gripe of mine with Jupiter. Whenever Atheist try to mix the death metal elements of their music with the jazzier, more technical drumming, it just sounds like a mess. On their older albums, Atheist did this with ease, so I’m just left here wondering what the hell happened. But none of that is as bad as the fucking nu-metal riff at 0:55. But wait, now there’s one of the fucking laziest breakdowns I’ve ever heard in my fucking life at 3:39! WHY?????? This is nothing like the Atheist of old. Instead, it’s a mockery of what used to be one of the best death metal bands in existence. I honestly can’t fathom how this is even Atheist.

Thankfully, ‘Third Person’ is the last song here. The intro was decently enough–a hell of a lot better than most of this album–but the vocals again make this laughable. This song has more of that chugging failure that has ruined some of the other songs on Jupiter, and by now, I can’t believe that they ever let such lazy riffing bear the Atheist name, a name which used to guaranty quality and originality.

Ever since I heard the first rumors about this album, I’ve been excited for it. Sure, reunions sometimes fail miserably, but hey, Cynic’s recent reunion turned out wonderfully. Traced in Air isn’t Focus, but it feels like a Cynic album, a definitively logical progression from their older material. Jupiter, unfortunately, feels like a rushed mash-up of bad ideas that were formed based on what the modern perception of technical death metal is, not the perception that Atheist pioneered for the genre back in the day. I hate to write such a negative review for a band I that used to be one of my favorites, but all I can say is that this is a genuine response from a genuine fan. I went into this wanting it to be my favorite album of the year, and it ended up being one of the most disappointing albums I’ve ever listened to. No joke, I actually shed a tear when I finished my first listen of Jupiter. Sorry, Atheist, but I can’t honestly recommend this album to anyone in good faith.

not "bad" per se, but it's a trudge even for a track-by-track review and seems far too exaggeratedly emotional.